Yoast SEO assessment: Text length

What does the text length check do?

Every page on your site needs to contain a certain amount of words to be able to rank. How long your text should be, depends on the kind of page: taxonomy pages require (slightly) less content than posts, whereas cornerstone content should be exhaustive and therefore needs to contain a significant amount of words.

Taxonomy page

>250 words

Regular post or page

>300 words

Cornerstone content page

>900 words

This check calculates how many words you’ve added on a page and whether it contains enough words to properly rank.

Why is text length important for SEO?

There are several reasons why text length is important for SEO. First of all: pages that contain very little (textual) content are more likely to be considered of little value to users, and therefore ‘thin content’ pages, by the search engines. Furthermore: the longer your text is, the easier it is for search engines to determine what it’s about, especially if it’s well-optimized for your keyphrase or phrases. You’ll probably have more headings, more links, and more pictures containing the keyphrase. Finally, writing a longer text makes it more likely you’ll rank for multiple long tail variants of the keyphrase you optimized your text for. After all, in a lengthy text, you probably discuss multiple subtopics. Your article will have a chance to turn up in search results for all these long tail variants.